IXXO Multi Vendor takes full advantage of Paypal Adaptive Chained and Parallel Payments, allowing you to automatically collect payments from customers and distribute them to multiple vendors. But that is not all.

If you're planning to use IXXO Multi-Vendor to take advantage of the Adaptive Payments API, it will help to understand the three methods of payment available to you - simple, parallel and chained - along with which is most appropriate to your application.

Simple Payments

This is your one-to-one transaction. It's a single payment from a sender being delivered to a single receiver. If you've been using PayPal for any length of time, this is most traditional form of payment - it has a single buyer and a single seller.

When to use Simple Payments

There is the obvious scenario of a one-to-one transaction such as a simple shopping cart application with a single seller. However, you may also decide to utilize a simple payment when your application is already setup to handle distributions or if you prefer to develop your own system for handling payment distributions.

Parallel Payments

Parallel Payments often get confused with chained payments because both have the ability to distribute a single transaction among multiple recipients. The way in which this happens is quite different between the two. Parallel Payments are split directly between 2-6 receiver accounts. Each Pay request in the API can support multiple payments to different PayPal accounts.

When to use Parallel Payments

A Parallel Payment is helpful in scenarios where a buyer makes a single purchase from multiple sellers in the same application. Keep in mind, that Parallel Payments allow for any sort of "middleman" commission. It's simply split between sellers based on what's in the cart at the time of checkout and the Shop Owner (middleman). If your application splits a transaction between sellers and need an account for any sort of "middleman" commission fee, you'll probably want to use Parallel Payments.

Chained Payments

Like Parallel Payments, chained payments split a transaction between multiple sellers. However, it does so indirectly by first depositing a payment into a single account called the "Primary Receiver." Usually, the Primary Receiver acts as some sort of "middleman" and will first take fee before splitting the payment between the Secondary Receivers accordingly. Chained Payments also offer another advantage which is called "Delayed Chained Payments." By default, both Parallel Payments and Chained Payments are processed and split immediately. This is not always optimum in cases where you may want to ensure some sort of action on behalf of the Secondary Receivers prior to distributing a payment to them. Using Delayed Chained Payments, you are able to receive money into the Primary Receiver account and hold it for up to 90 days or until some action is performed.

When to use Chained Payments

If your application needs to take a cut of a transaction before distributing the balance of a transaction or if you require any sort of delayed payment distribution, you will want to use a Chained Payment. An example might be a drop-shipper who wants to first take a commission while ensuring the product(s) shipped prior to releasing payment.